For Oklahoma City, a Wound Too Deep for ‘Closure’

Where typewriters clattered and children napped, there is nothing but water, grass and sky. Sleep is deviled by nightmares. A museum keeps pictures of the dead framed in glass.

This is a town of walking wounded, people like Patti Hall, injured so badly in the infamous 1995 bombing attack--her lung punctured and 40 bones snapped--that some days she can hardly crawl out of bed.

“I keep myself going,” the 64-year-old Hall says, “because this can’t mean my life is over. It’ll never be the same, but we keep going.”

A judge’s word is due today on whether to further delay the execution of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh, a spectacle that has been dangling in legal uncertainty nearly a month. Commentators and government officials are mouthing that word again, voicing their mythical promise: closure.

Watching McVeigh die would “help [victims and bereaved families] meet their need to close this chapter in their lives,” Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said earlier this year.

But in this town, where the heartland’s heart was shattered on a spring morning, nobody’s holding his breath. The truth is, Oklahoma City doesn’t want to get over the bombing--not if that means forgetting about it.

“The last six years have been hell, and I don’t even know what the meaning of closure is,” sighs Jannie Coverdale. Her grandsons, 5-year-old Aaron and 2-year-old Elijah, died in the blast.

“I think what it is, you learn to live with your heartache,” Coverdale says. “So that’s what we’re trying to do.”

These roads still dip and twist; the porches still yawn in the old neighborhoods; shade still brims beneath sprawling trees. The stockyards and delis and botanical gardens still stand, along with the zoo and the Statehouse and all the other pretty attractions a middle-American city could hope to boast.

But closure? Whatever it is, the victims say, it doesn’t reside in Oklahoma City.

“To me, that would indicate you’ve dealt with it and can get on with it,” says Sara Sweet, 28. Her father was crushed to death in the explosion. “My life has changed so much that I’m not even the same person anymore.”

The numbers, statistical skeletons, have become thoughtless and automatic--have wormed their way into popular knowledge. They voice them without pause: April 19, 1995. 9:02 a.m. 168 souls.

Where did you stand? How did you hear? When did you wake up?

“I didn’t know what had happened. I had six floors of debris on top of me,” Hall says.

“It took them 12 days to find my father,” Sweet says. “We stayed up for days. When the TV news went back to regular programming, we felt like they’d abandoned us.”

“I screamed at God,” Coverdale says.

Things remembered. Stains that seep too deep.

“It divided our history,” says Oklahoma City police chaplain Jack Poe. “Everything we talk about, even in my own family, it’s always, ‘Oh, was that before the bombing, or after?’ ”

Maybe the rest of the nation wants Oklahoma City to stop crying, to write a few pages of history and move along.

“From my very cynical point of view, the idea of closure comes from this linear idea of a beginning, middle and end,” says Charles A. Guarnaccia, a clinical psychologist at the University of North Texas.

“I think it’s a creation of the media.”

After all, nobody put the federal building back together again. Once the carnage, twisted metal and shattered windows were hauled off, the space stood vacant. The landscape was not allowed to swallow, grow over or cover up the scars, to become a tidy municipal block once again.

Instead, the ground was named sacred and set aside. It’s part park, part shrine: a wind-combed, post-apocalyptic field of rock and empty chairs and gaping spaces. Few shadows; mute and barren.

Bud Welch haunts this place like a ghost with sagging eyes. He ducks reporters into his musty pickup when the afternoon showers shimmer in the hot streets. The television crews stand around and wait their turn; he’s booked interviews one after the next. In between, he shaves in the rearview mirror, flips through a worn copy of “Lake Wobegon Days.”

He loves talking to reporters. It’s wearing him away, but he’s hooked.

“I want the world to know who my kid was,” he says. “I keep Julie alive that way.”

He clutches snapshots in a worn envelope: Julie, 23, crouched beside a flowering shrub a few days before her death. Julie at his side, a black summer night wrapped around them. Julie graduating from Marquette University.

“I’m going to use you,” Bud tells a reporter, “as long as I can.”

A few blocks away, the schoolkids are filing into the museum. They tug nervously at their ponytails, snap their gum, slip into the gift shop to run fingers over the baseball caps and umbrellas, post cards and coffee cups.

We come here to remember.

Behind the desk where visitors plunk down their $7, the shop peddles all manner of self-help books, over-the-counter slugs of psychotherapy. Tourists can take home recorded music from the victims’ memorial services, trapped on CD and packaged in plastic.

We will not forget, the signs vow. Who could in such a place?

Near the museum, a lone tree rises and spreads. The “survivors’ elm” has become a symbol--back in 1995, the tree stood unscathed in a flaming parking lot.

Today, there is a sign entreating tourists to stop shredding off keepsake strips of bark. No more coins poked into the creases, either, if you please. They’re killing the survivors’ elm, those tourists.

A spring marathon took the bombing as its theme. Banners flap on lampposts lining the downtown streets.

Honor their memory, the flags say. Celebrate life. Reach for the future.

But Oklahoma City will keep one foot solidly stuck in 1995. No matter what happens to McVeigh, or when it happens, that won’t change.

“The execution’s not gonna bring me closure.” When Kathy Wilburn brings the word out, you can hear the quotation marks hanging off it. Like Coverdale, she lost two baby grandsons.

“I don’t even know why I’m going to witness it,” muses Wilburn, who plans to watch McVeigh die on closed-circuit television. “It’s not going to solve anything.

“It just seems like if somebody kills your children, you ought to be there.”